The phonetic alphabet for the letter "R" today is 'Romeo', which was introduced as the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet (IRSA) and was adopted by NATO as its standard in 1956.

A male is a ‘mike’. We use letters selected from a standard phonetic, or spelling, alphabet so nobody fumbles for words. Spelling alphabets came about because early users of radios ...

The ITU’s First Global Phonetic Alphabet But plenty of organizations ... features Roger for the letter r [PDF]. It’s not surprising that it made the cut: Not only had the U.S. already been ...